Chateau Rayas Grenache Wine and Picanha

I don't know exactly how to say this...

Anyway this woman with a fast sports car - happens to be blue - turned up three days ago and took a few of us out to dinner. So we went to this relatively quiet place right in the heart of the city here. And I'm not going to say where. They do not need any endorsements from me - maybe from her, but we'll not go into that!

'Ghosts of Benghazi' blue...

So she was celebrating - you know, like Jesus and Abraham and Noah et al - with wine, mostly. It was an event viewed more or less as the culmination of a massive enterprise, in which various individuals had played a tiny hand or two here and there, mostly feeding misinformation to some people. Enough on that, though; it's not important. Well not now, anyway.

I had only just been tailing a couple of these foreign-looking gentlemen coming out of the local Supreme Court, half an hour earlier, with their velvet robe sacks slung over their hard-working and earnest shoulders... They went back up to the top floor of a very tall building, where Bain & Co has its offices. I'm sure they know all about wine and steak and power and politics and so on... There's nothing going on here genuinely important - other than that for some reason there happens to be a lot of 'executive security' people around key places in the city at the moment. This is a far away place - nowhere near any kind of real political power centers. Who knows... Bain, as you probably are aware, were the crew that lured Snowden away from Booz, et cetera et cetera and if I don't literally say the name maybe no 'word searches' will pick this all up here. The one guy they ought to pull into a Congressional Hearing is Alan Rusbridger - but nay, that will of course, never happen in this reality.

Back to the dinner.

Well, it's taken me three days and three nights to come back down from it. Meanwhile of course, most of you have been either being severely disturbed, or equally enraptured as was my own circumstance - by the couple of speeches given by the President of the United States.

Now let's not over-indulge in political argument about this - that's something the ordinary folks do; we're not 'ordinary' around here. Besides, we're talking about red wine and picanha steaks.

It was a Chateau Rayas grenache and shiraz (well, the French say 'Syrah')... Oh, um, about twenty years old in the bottle.

And the picanha - well, put it this way: it was one of the most insane experiences of my life thus far.

...Literally has taken me three days and nights to come down from the whole thing. I mean there's no way I can properly describe these things - people use all kinds of words, the steak was 'buttery,' 'tender,' 'full of flavor,' and the wine was 'fresh,' and 'vibrant,' and 'sugary' and 'leathery,' and 'tawny...' God, I don't know. Sure they were all of those things. I cannot really explain why one would instantly come to the conclusion though, that something was catapulting you into sensations to do with 'highest imaginable quality' - but that's what happened. And I just kept shaking my head all night. As the remembrance of the actual mouth sensations and taste are drifting out of my immediate consciousness now, I haven't had to SMH, for a good few hours already.  The 'ghost who walks' has already left by plane days ago. ; )